Reviews

Ripped from the headlines. Kuboyama Aikichi, radio operator on the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (第五福龍丸) died from liver cirrhosis, Castle Bravo irradiation and a secondary hepatitis C infection from transfusion treatment for the radiation, just one month before this movie opened in theatres.

The conversion of the suitably invasive breath weapon used here into a beam weapon in the sprawling franchise that followed is sad.

This satire on Fukushima is hilarious down to the slight social nuances, such as Ichikawa Mikako playing Ogashira Hiromi, an otherwise quite direct nerd who prefaces the statement of a simple and relevant fact in a formal meeting with the polite phrase “Okotoba desu ga...”, which is essentially an apology for ever speaking: “Alas, these are words”. The satire leads into the decision to place the focus on government officials. Ogashira, the Deputy Director of the Nature Conservation Bureau, never gets near Godzilla but pitches in as much as anyone else. Bizarrely, this is where the focus stays. Anno and Higuchi do include some cool special effects, but there is much less of the rubber-suited tokusatsu aesthetic and urban destruction than I expected from them, and no action heroes at all. Similarly, Godzilla’s strongest attack is more tragic than it is horrific.

Instead of action, horror or personal heroics, the theme is national rejuvenation through overwork, chiefly within the famously labyrinthine, non-partisan civil-service bureaucracy, which looks about the same here as in The Japanese: A Cultural Portrait (1978). Even the JSDF pilots scramble by rota, making a point of not calling for volunteers. Some theorize that rogue zoology professor Maki meant for Godzilla to be a test of Japan’s spirit, supposedly calcified in this bureaucracy. Nobody openly theorizes that Maki is Godzilla: It would be quite a coincidence for him to disappear in Tokyo Bay shortly before Godzilla appears and the consumed nuclear waste is discovered, and for the final shot of the frozen tail to reveal such humanoid-looking creatures. Indeed, the decision to converge on Godzilla’s classic form makes intradiegetic sense only if the humanoid traits come from an actual human. Maki being Godzilla would also explain why it goes to Tokyo. Anno probably meant for it to be true that Godzilla changes its own biology on the fly, but this neither makes sense on its own nor does it explain the Tyrannosaurus arms, unless Maki’s in there somehow, guiding that evolution.

I like fission as a kaijū power source, but that’s the only part of Godzilla’s powers in this version that might have made sense in a naturalistic framework. The detail that its fissile material is new to science is superfluous. Despite spending so much time on the Japanese government as a system and the need to evacuate civilians, Anno ultimately rejects naturalism in favour of the Yaguchi Plan, pumping a huge amount of an unknown, unseen, new chemical into the mouth of the implausible creature. This plan apparently presupposes that Godzilla cannot move its mouth even 1 m/s after firing its lasers, that its ability to disable a drone while asleep cannot interfere with the tanker trucks, that it will automatically swallow everything pumped into its mouth despite swallowing nothing else, and that the substance will work if it’s merely swallowed, not being regurgitated or separated from the bloodstream in a digestive tract. These presuppositions appear implausible and baseless. It would have made more sense to load the substance into those nearby highrises—whose existence after the MOP retaliation is a continuity error—before hitting the creature with another couple of MOP bunker busters to expose its blood. Perhaps the Yaguchi Plan is supposed to be symbolic of pumping coolant into Fukushima Dai-ichi or, like the “special bakelite” of Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), stand as a throwback to the early days of General Products.

I expected roughly this level of silliness. I also expected suspicious treatment of the USA, and I got it. The US wants to hit Godzilla with a hydrogen bomb, while it’s still in downtown Tokyo, to cover up US involvement in its mysterious origins. Ishihara Satomi as Kayoco Ann Patterson is the most glamorous character in the film; she’s second only to Yaguchi in approximating the sexy and rebellious young heroes I expect in a US Godzilla production, but her English isn’t good enough, and her Japanese not bad enough. The English-language dialogue is generally stiff and overly poetic, making the foreigners seem a lot less human than the bureaucrats. Patterson’s lineage, career plans and thoughts on Godzilla-Gojira nomenclature are superfluous. I have to think she was included for the same reasons as Fujitani Ayako in Ritual (2000), symbolizing a fusion of Japanese and US mentality in the Anpo era via biological hybridization. It is fun to see Anpo itself coming into effect.

I would have preferred internally coherent science fiction with a more believeable Patterson and without a couple of the bureaucratic scenes, but the franchise is long since fundamentally broken and can hardly be rescued by realism. Anno and Higuchi’s weird artistry keeps it fresh. There’s an early shot where they toy with the camera, they make a visual symphony out of copiers rolling into position for a task force’s new office, the music’s an eclectic mix of NGE-like Shirō Sagisu tunes and tributes to the 1950s original, Godzilla’s first form looks wonderfully goofy and bizarre, the military hardware is fetishized, and the superimposed captions go deep. It is as it should be. In fact, even the bureaucratic focus aged well: The film describes not only Fukushima but also Japan’s disastrous response to the Diamond Princess in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.